RIP Branding(As We Knew It. Good Riddance?)!

 

Caveat: This is a loooong post. So, in case you feel like saying ‘ so long ‘, I will understand.

 

This is a SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story. Not a eulogy. A wake-up call. Handle with irreverence.

 

Though the obituary was not formally written, it was on the cards. And everyone felt it.

 

So, What Does The Crime Scene Look Like?

 

Most brands aren’t facing a strategy problem. They’re facing a mindset fossilisation problem. It suffers from a thinking issue that has gone well past its sell by date. Where 1990s thinking is expected to solve 2026 problems. I am afraid that is not strategy. That is archaeology, willy nilly, re-visited with a magnifying lens. And some marketing budget for company.

 

So, what does the first radical act of future branding? Mindset re-engineering. Burn the mental debris. Or at least Hoover it — the logic behind it.

 

Brands that will survive 2030 won’t just be customer-centric. They’ll be customer-obsessed psychics — anticipating desires before the customer has Googled them, let alone articulated them.

 

Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers

 

This is classic Seth Godin. This is the one sentence that should be tattooed on every brand owner’s forearm. Revolutionary? Not exactly. The only disappointment is that most brands are not venturing into that territory.

 

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in & be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, Founder of Brandkarma and former Chief Creative Officer of J. Walter Thompson.

 

What Universities Should Be Teaching (But Aren’t)

Dear academia, kindly retire nostalgia. Branding students don’t need more case studies. They need:

  • Context agility: The ability to reframe problems in real time
  • Behavioral fluency: Understanding humans beyond data dashboards
  • Experimentation stamina: Build. Break. Rebuild. Repeat.
  • Ethical imagination: Because manipulation scales faster than trust
  • Unlearning as a core competency — because the half-life of a marketing framework is now shorter than a TikTok trend cycle.
  • And crucially — how to build communities, not campaigns. 90% of Gen Z say social media ads, influencer posts, and organic brand content have inspired some percentage of their purchases in the past six months. The classroom should smell less like brand strategy and more like cultural anthropology.

Teach them to think like anthropologists with entrepreneurial ADHD.

 

The Loyalty Contradiction

 

Loyalty in 2030 isn’t repeat purchase. It’s “I’ll forgive your screw-up because you saw my chaos coming.”

Example? Patagonia didn’t sell jackets. They sold permission to feel righteous about spending too much.

 

But the offbeat one: Liquid Death. They took tap water, put it in a tallboy can, and sold rebellion. No new product. Just a new product for an existing customer’s inner punk. That’s not marketing. That’s ventriloquism.

 

True loyalty — the deep, trust-based connection that brands aspire to — fell to 29% in 2025, a 5% drop from 2024. This shift reflects how fragile brand devotion has become in an era of endless choice, rising costs, and viral-driven alternatives.

 

In automotive — an industry that literally had families passing down brand allegiance like heirlooms — brand loyalty has dropped below 50% for the first time in modern measurement history, falling to 49% across all nameplates. The entire economics of customer acquisition and retention must be reconsidered.

 

And the consumers you’re counting on to carry your brand forward into 2030? 43% of U.S. Gen Zers have abandoned a brand they were once loyal to because they “grew bored” with it. Boredom. Not betrayal. Not price. Boredom. Your brand didn’t lose to a competitor. It lost to ennui(pronounced ahn-WEE).

 

The New Loyalty Runs on Completely Different Fuel

 

If you think that loyalty is still points and redemption, you are not only way behind the curve, but going downhill as well.

 

45% of consumers are more likely to trust a product if it goes viral. 33% trust TikTok and social media trends more than ads or brand websites. 41% have bought products promoted by influencers — almost double the overall average. Welcome to Trend Loyalty — an emotionally charged, fast-moving allegiance driven by viral moments rather than long-term relationships.

 

But here’s the double edged sword- where it gets genuinely fascinating and genuinely terrifying for traditional brand thinking: 40% of teens consider themselves loyal to a brand they have never purchased from. 54% say loyalty means telling friends about a brand. 40% say it means simply loving a brand, with no intent to buy.

 

Loyalty has decoupled from purchase. Your most powerful brand advocates may never spend a rupee with you. And your loyalty programme? It’s measuring the wrong thing entirely.

 

The brands winning this game understand this viscerally. E.l.f. Cosmetics didn’t run a single celebrity Super Bowl campaign in the traditional sense — it leaned into transparency, formulation honesty, and let Gen Z validate it themselves on TikTok. The brand now ranks as the #1 favourite beauty brand among Gen Z, with net sales exceeding $1 billion and 28 consecutive quarters of sales growth.

 

Now, you decide if thats that’s a marketing story or a mindset story.

 

Contrary to the general perception, the future isn’t tech. It’s mindset agility.

When Nike started selling connected fitness not sneakers, they stopped being a shoe company. When KFC sold chicken-scented fire logs(yes, really), they stopped selling food—they sold absurdist comfort.

That’s the arsenal: Radical empathy + cheerful self-cannibalism.

Your perspective handcuffs? “But we’ve always done it this way.”
The key? “What if we burned the playbook and asked strangers on Reddit?”

 

The C-Suite Has Lost Faith

NielsenIQ’s “CMO Outlook: Guide to 2026“ report shows only 69% of marketing leaders believe their CEOs and CFOs support long-term brand investment—an 11 percentage-point drop from 2024 .

Here’s the kicker: 84% of CMOs now view ROI as their primary metric for budget allocation.

Let me repeat that: Return on investment is now the primary metric.

Not brand love. Not emotional connection. Not cultural relevance. ROI.

We’ve reduced the most human discipline in business to a spreadsheet. And then we wonder why trust is hemorrhaging.

 

The Attention Economy Has Collapsed

The IPA’s January 2026 research dropped a bomb the industry is still picking shrapnel from. Charlie Ebdy from Omnicom introduced the concept of “advertising secular stagnation“—borrowing from Depression-era economics to describe environmental factors that cap returns regardless of how brilliant your creative is.

Translation? It’s not you. It’s the environment. Smartphone adoption since 2015 has layered incremental media consumption onto existing habits. You’re not competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with everything—TikTok, doomscrolling, group chats, and the existential dread of 2026.

The data shows: individual advertising exposures now occupy progressively smaller fractions of any person’s total media time. Your million-dollar campaign? It’s fighting for a sliver of attention that gets thinner every quarter .

 

The ONE Actionable Wisdom: Stop Defending. Start Evolving

 

Across every industry vertical — FMCG, automotive, luxury, fintech, healthcare — the single most dangerous person in any brand organisation is the guardian who has confused protection with preservation.

 

The brand book is not a scripture. It is a living document. Treat it accordingly.

 

Gen Z consumers are five times more likely than older generations to believe newer brands are better or more innovative — which makes the switching cost for disappointing them close to zero. Five times. The loyalty is genuine, but it evaporates the moment you stop being interesting, honest, or useful.

 

New Balance understood this. The brand reached $9.2 billion in revenue in 2025, growing 180% since 2020 — built on a shift from transaction-based marketing to athlete storytelling and creator-first content. They didn’t reinvent their logo. They reinvented their relationship with culture.

 

That is the work. Not the tagline. Not the guidelines. The relationship.

 

The SOHB Story To-Do: Stick Your Neck Out

 

-Run a “What Would We Do If We Started Today?” board session. This quarter. With people who are allowed to say the uncomfortable things.

-Kill one sacred brand assumption before the year ends. Just one. You’ll survive. The brand might not if you don’t.

-Find three customers whose unmet problem you’ve been ignoring because it didn’t fit your product range. Now redesign backwards from their need.

-Stop measuring loyalty by purchase frequency alone. Start measuring advocacy, trust, and cultural resonance. The old dashboard is lying to you.

– Delete the “customer journey maps.” Archive the “brand voice guidelines“. Instead, sit with one customer who left. Not a loyalist. Not a promoter. A leaver. Don’t ask why they left. They’ll lie. Or worse, they’ll tell you the truth you can’t handle.

Ask this instead: “What did you wish we’d build, but never did?” Then build that.

Even if it cannibalizes your cash cow. Especially if it cannibalizes your cash cow.

Because the alternative is watching someone else build it—and take your customers with them.

 

The Resurrection: What Replaces Branding

So if branding is dead, what takes its place?

The New Trinity: Usefulness + Trust + Cultural Agility

Not “brand voice.” Not “visual identity.” Not “positioning statements.”

Usefulness: Are you solving a problem today? Not the problem from your 2019 strategy deck. The problem your customer woke up with this morning.

Trust: Would your brand pass the “bank loan” test? If your brand walked into a bank, would they approve the loan?

Cultural Agility: Can you pivot faster than the algorithm changes? The now, next generation doesn’t reward consistency. They reward relevance.

 

RIP BRANDING (AS WE ONCE KNEW IT)

Not a provocation. A post-mortem.

Let’s not romanticize it.
Branding didn’t evolve. It got outpaced.

While we were polishing taglines, the market rewired itself. Quietly. Ruthlessly. Irreversibly.

So here lies “Branding as we knew it.”
Cause of death? A mismatch with reality.

 

Let’s examine the landscape that has caused this to happen:-

 

A. Attention Has Atomised

The average human attention span didn’t just shrink. It fragmented.

Google’s Zero Moment of Truth collapsed decision cycles into seconds.

    • Short-form video turned storytelling into a thumb war.
    • Multi-screen behavior means your “campaign” is now competing with WhatsApp, cricket scores, and a meme about office chai… simultaneously.

Implication: Brand recall has been replaced by momentary relevance.

You are not remembered. You are rediscovered…every single time.

 

B. Trust Has Been Decentralised

Once upon a time, brands built trust through repetition.

Today, trust is outsourced.

  • Over 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations over advertising.
  • Reviews, Reddit threads, creator opinions have more sway than your biggest media burst.
  • A single viral customer complaint can outgun a ₹50 crore campaign.

Implication: The brand is no longer the storyteller. The customer is.

And customers don’t follow scripts.

 

C.Choice Has Exploded

Globalization + D2C + digital rails = infinite shelf space.

  • Categories that once had 5 players now have 500.
  • Switching costs are near zero. Loyalty is one click away from abandonment.
  • Discovery algorithms constantly tempt consumers with “something better.”

Implication: Differentiation has a half-life. Relevance doesn’t.

You are not competing with your category.
You are competing with everything that solves the same tension differently.

 

D.Data Has Flipped the Power Equation

Earlier, brands guessed. Consumers adapted.

Now:

  • Brands track behavior in real time.
  • Consumers expect hyper-personalized experiences in return.
  • If Netflix can recommend perfectly, why can’t your brand even remember me?

Implication: Generic branding feels like incompetence.

Personalisation is no longer a feature. It’s hygiene.

 

E.Purpose Is Under Surveillance

Purpose used to be a brand garnish. Now it’s under a microscope.

  • Consumers fact-check claims instantly.
  • ESG, sustainability, ethics are not PR levers, they are purchase drivers.
  • “Woke-washing” gets called out within hours.

Implication: You don’t own your purpose. Your behavior does.

Consistency between what you say and what you do is now audited…publicly.

 

F.The Funnel Has Collapsed

The neat funnel we worshipped has turned into a chaotic web.

  • Awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy… now happen in loops.
  • A TikTok video can trigger discovery, validation, and purchase in under 3 minutes.
  • Post-purchase experience is often more influential than pre-purchase advertising.

Implication:Branding is no longer a top-of-funnel activity. It is the entire experience.

Every touchpoint is branding. Every failure is branding.

 

So What Actually Died?

Not branding.
The illusion of control.

  • Control over narrative? Gone.
  • Control over timing? Gone.
  • Control over perception? Negotiated in real time.

What replaces it? Adaptive relevance.

 

The New Laws of Branding (May I Recommend That You Write These in Permanent Ink?)

  1. From Identity to Utility
    If your brand doesn’t do, it doesn’t matter what it says.
  2. From Consistency to Context
    Same message everywhere is lazy.
    Contextual intelligence is the new craft.
  3. From Campaigns to Systems
    Campaigns spike. Systems sustain.
    Build engines, not fireworks.
  4. From Ownership to Participation
    You don’t own your brand.
    You co-create it with your ecosystem.

 

Final Word( I See You Breathing A Sigh Of Relief?)

 

“RIP Branding” is not a eulogy. It’s a reset button.

 

The old playbook optimized for stability.
The new one thrives on flux.

 

So don’t defend your brand.

 

Rebuild it.
Continuously.
Relentlessly.
Publicly.

 

Because the market isn’t asking, “What do you stand for?”

 

It’s asking, “How fast can you evolve… before I move on?”

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

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